Porto’s Superior School of Music and Performing Arts (ESMAE), belonging to the Porto’s Polytechnic Institute emerged (1994), after the extinction of the Superior School of Music, with intention to widen its offer of graduation courses to other artistic areas beyond music. Nowadays, ESMAE encloses three departments: Music, where it offers degrees in the most various areas, such as instrument, singing, composition, ancient music, jazz, production and music technologies; Theatre department, that is responsible for the education in branches such as: acting, stage management, scenography, costumes design, light and sound design and the department of Image's art (Photography, Cinema, Audiovisual and Multimedia). As a School of Performing Arts, ESMAE gives a particular importance to the performances and exhibitions of its pupils, since this is an essential complement in order to achieve their courses objectives. These performances have as principal aim the promotion of a strong and permanent contact between the young artists and its future public, which by these means can have the chance of knowing them and learning how to appreciate them. In this context, ESMAE has a Concert Coffee and the Theatre Helena Sá Costa, which are the stages of a great part of the performances of students of this school. Furthermore, ESMAE has developed varied partnerships in order to give a chance to its students to show their work, off campus through concerts of chamber music and orchestra, in Serralves, Quinta da Bonjóia and the Coliseu do Porto, among others. ESMAE has, currently, about 800 students and 115 teachers and already graduated more than five hundred artists and musicians.

The collection

ESMAE's collection is very wide in content types and mainly represents a performing art school's archive ranging from theatre and music performances in audio and video, photos, scores, concert programs, texts, and so on. This specificity maybe interesting mainly for the formation/education/research context for all the students and teachers. The archive we are making available for ECLAP is not focused on thematic collections though we have an interesting collection of audio and video material of HARMOS Festival (european chamber music festival) with musical performances of the best students from some of the most important european music schools mapping the average level of the european HEI (High education institutions). Additionaly we have a small but very interesting collection of concert programs, scores and texts from an eminent portuguese woman from the beggining of the 20th century, Maria Isabel de Lima de Brito e Cunha, with an important overview of the cultural life in Porto during part of the 20th century.

We have in our archives a big part of HARMOS festival concerts at Casa da Música. This international chamber music festival joins some of the best students and recently graduated musicians from the most renowed superior schools of music in Europe and the audio, video and photo collection represents an important document of these young and talented musicians that will be the future of the performance in music.
Videos will follow soon

The Concert programs, mainly from Porto mid XXth century, are an important overview from that period with relevant portuguese and international artists performing in the region. Some program notes are also relevant from artists and musicologists from the time. This example gathers two of the most important portuguese musicians from the XXth century: the conductor Pedro de Freitas Branco and the pianist Helena Sá e Costa (part of the archives donated by the family of Maria Isabel de Lima de Brito e Cunha).

This collection of the spanish magazine "Ilustración Musical", from the end of the XIX century, is one interesting piece of our archive and it is part of the varied collection from Maria Isabel de Lima de Brito e Cunha.